From the New York Times and the Korea Times we get opposite sides of the same coin: Is it safe to get vaccines (and other forms of medical treatment) during pregnancy? Sphere: Related Content

Korea Telecom has announced their pricing plans for the "new" iPhone and other smart phones, though they haven't yet worked out the subsidies with Apple, so they don't know how much the iPhone will cost the consumer to take it home. Sphere: Related Content

Cars and people were swept out to sea by the fast-churning water as survivors fled to high ground, where they remained huddled hours later. Signs of devastation were everywhere, with a giant boat getting washed ashore and coming to rest on the edge of a highway and floodwaters swallowing up cars and homes.

American Samoa Gov. Togiola Tulafono said at least 50 were injured, in addition to the deaths.

Hampered by power and communications outages, officials struggled to assess the casualties and damage. But the death toll seemed sure to rise, with dead bodies already piling up at a hospital in Samoa.

The quake, with a magnitude between 8.0 and 8.3, struck around dawn about 20 miles below the ocean floor, 120 miles (190 kilometers) from American Samoa, a U.S. territory that is home to 65,000 people.

Among the dead were at least two South Koreans, possibly more:

"According to our embassy in New Zealand, two South Koreans were dead and one went missing due to the tsunami generated by the strong earthquake," [a ROK Foreign Ministry official] said. "We are trying to find out whether there were more victims."

The victims include a 62-year-old fisherman, Lee In-saeng, and a woman in her 40s only identified by her family name Shin, the official said, adding Shin's seven-year-old daughter is missing.

"There are 234 South Korean residents in American Samoa, mostly involved in deep-sea fishery, but no South Korean resides in Samoa," he said.

Tragic. I had hoped other places would be as lucky as we were. When I heard that the tsunami watch was downgraded to a tsunami advisory, I had no idea that something like this had happened. Requiescant in pace.

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Shut-ins, they're called. People who can't take being bombarded with all the "English" surrounding them on the streets of Seoul so they just stay home. The Chosun Ilbo has an article on them, complaining about how Korean names for food shoppes (innovatively named Chongno this and Chongno that) have been supplanted by Tous les Jours, Cold Stone Creamery, A Twosome Place, Red Mango, and other names that make little sense to those who haven't studied English since the twelfth grade (assuming they were even paying attention then).

Coffee has become an essential part of the daily lives of Koreans. Each Korean drank 288 cups of coffee in 2008, based on the amount of coffee beans that were imported that year. But elderly Koreans, who cannot speak English, as well as some younger Koreans who are not yet au fait with the coffee jargon, say ordering the beverage is strange and difficult.

"Coffee is imported, so we cannot do anything about the names," says one man in his 60s. "But why are the sizes classified as 'short' or 'tall' in English?" he said. "I'm a university graduate and have lived without any problems until now. I never imagined I'd end up getting nervous ordering coffee."

[above: From the Korean writing on the package, I know that this product contains 짱 and 구. And probably several chemicals that will give you toxic poop.]

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1. USFK commander says that Kim Jong-il appears healthy and firmly "in charge" of North Korea (Bloomberg)
2. Economies of South Korea and China showing signs of "overheating" (Bloomberg)
3. North Korean tension leads to Russia pulling out of plan for gas pipeline to meet South Korean energy needs (Joongang Daily)
4. Vice Minister of Unification says Kŭmgangsan tours not linked to nuclear disarmament issue (Korea Times)
5. Chinese leader Wen Jiabao to sign trade accords in North Korea (Wall Street Journal)
6. Moammar Gadaffi to quit politics, star in biopic about Edward James Olmos

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The US edition of the Wall Street Journal has an interesting overview of the trend toward "tightening" of ties betwen South Korea and the United States. The story accompanies an extensive interview with US Ambassador to South Korea Kathleen Stevens.

Ambassador Stevens is fairly popular in South Korea, in part because she has extensive experience in the country, going back to her days in the Peace Corps, during which she learned Korean.

The interview covers a lot of ground, including North Korean nukes, US ties with South Korea, the visa waiver program, the free-trade agreement, etc. Here's what she said about reunification:

For the United States in particular, as such a close ally of South Korea, we have to be really clear at all times that this is a peninsula that belongs to the Korean people. The future of this peninsula should be in the hands of the Korean people. We do agree with our allies in South Korea that the reunification of Korea peacefully, under democratic principles and principles that allow respect for human rights and opportunity for everyone, is the way to go. That's kind of an obvious thing to say but it's important to say it.

Beyond that, I'm interested in Koreans' thoughts about the future of this place because the U.S. has a supporting role to play and we also have very important interests here. That is a conversation we can have at all kinds of levels. If you look at the joint vision statement of the two presidents, they kind of said it there. We want to be clear as Americans that we do believe reunification, as I described it, is what we want.

In terms of development and everything else, I look at as someone who's been here and seen South Korea over a long time. There's 20-odd million people north of the DMZ [the demilitarized zone, the inter-Korean border] who have, I have to think, the same aspirations and talents and humanity that people south of the DMZ have. I've seen what's happened in this country as we all have over the last 30, 40, 50 years. People call it a miracle, but it wasn't a miracle. It was because of the extraordinary talent and hard work of the South Korean people, and good policies and good leadership. To me, it gives me reason to be hopeful that people in the North will have those opportunities too. And if they have those opportunities, they can make the most of them.

She also chimes in on her popularity, and why many South Koreans may feel almost a kinship with her:

I've been obviously pleased but also overwhelmed at times by the interest in me here. One reason for that is the American ambassador is always a person of interest here. But what South Korean people have told me is the fact that the United States chose as ambassador somebody who speaks Korean -- badly, but they don't say badly -- is taken as a compliment to South Korea. And I did try to really use Korean as much as I possibly could when I got here, even when it was cringe-inducing to me. I tried to do some things on a light side, but also in policy when I could use clear terms.

And it's the power of the media, especially on television, because people do recognize me and they come up and speak Korean to me. And they say, "We're glad you're here because you understand us." Well, I may not understand as much as they think I do. And they say, "We really want to have a better relationship between the United States and Korea." Well, that's what I'm here to do, just as every ambassador is here to do, but I think maybe it's a little bit easier for me to be perceived that way.

And they pull out pictures from the 1970s and there's an appreciation, while it's far more than I deserve, that I was here when things were tough and that we've had a shared experience.

It's a popular thing to bash governments, including (especially?) the Seoul government, but for anyone who has been here in the 1990s or earlier, the world of difference between then and now is striking. It is the defining characteristic of South Korea. It's one thing that makes me hopeful and upbeat about South Korea in general, because I can see that with almost everything there is, Korea is headed in the right direction. Not everything, mind you, but in enough areas that I feel that, were I to stay away from Seoul until, say, the middle of the next decade, I'd be pleasantly surprised. Maybe pleasantly overwhelmed. Sphere: Related Content

UPDATE:
The tsunami watch was downgraded to a tsunami advisory at 10:23 a.m. local time (5:23 a.m. Korea). It will be in effect until 7 p.m.

ORIGINAL POST:
I wake up this morning and they're telling us that Hawaii is under a tsunami watch thanks to an undersea earthquake near Samoa that measure 7.9 on the Richter scale. It is not known for sure if a tsunami was generated. A more serious tsunami warning was issued for New Zealand.

The earthquake occurred at 7:48 a.m. on Tuesday, Hawaii time, which would be 2:48 a.m. on Wednesday, Korea time. The watch was declared seventeen minutes later, at 8:05 a.m. If a tsunami were to reach the Hawaiian Islands, about 4200 kilometers (2600 miles) away, they're saying the earliest expected arrival time would be 1:11 p.m. local time (8:11 a.m. Korea time).

The earthquake struck at a depth of 20.5 miles. For those wishing to Google it, the earthquake 110 miles east-northeast of Hihifo, Tonga; 125 miles south-southwest of Apia, Samoa; 435 miles north-northeast of Nukualofa, Tonga; and 1670 miles north-northeast of Auckland, New Zealand.

New Zealand, home to at least some of my readers, is one of several areas under a more serious tsunami warning: American Samoa, Samoa, Niue, Wallis-Futuna, Tokelau, Cook Islands, Tonga, Tuvalu, Kiribati, Kermadec Islands, Howland-Baker, Jarvis Island, New Zealand, French Polynesia, and Palmyra Atoll.

Hawaii is listed as under a tsunami watch along with Vanuatu, Nauru, Marshall Islands, Solomon Islands, Johnston Atoll, New Caledonia, Kosrae, Papua New Guinea, Pohnpeo, Wake Island, Pitcairn Island, and Midway.

My understanding was that the difference between a watch and a warning (for hurricanes, tornadoes, tsunamis) was that a watch was a possibility based on current conditions but a warning indicated a significantly more stepped-up likelihood of the event occurring in the near future. [Edit: It appears I wasn't far off.]

Honolulu is along the south side of Oahu, more vulnerable to events in that direction than, say, the North Shore.

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The Orange County Superior Court has decided that 41-year-old Martin Burt Kuehl, a resident of the central OC community of Costa Mesa, must stand trial for gross vehicular manslaughter involving a texting-while-driving incident.

Kuehl is charged with hitting 32-year-old Martha Ovella (below), a nanny in Newport Beach, as she was walking to work in late August 2008. The collision, which occurred in a crosswalk, killed her.

If Kuehl is convicted of this felony, he faces up to nine years in prison.

A commissioner for the court noted that while Kuehl was not sending or receiving text messages at the exact moment of the crash, "Kuehl had his cell phone in his hand during the incident, and had been texting back and forth with a friend for several miles prior to the crash."

The Orange County Register reports other such cases:

Kuehl is not the only individual facing criminal charges for a fatality allegedly caused by texting while driving. Jeffrey Woods, 21, of Huntington Beach is scheduled to go to trial Oct. 5 for hitting and killing 14-year-old Danny Oates as he rode his bicycle on Aug. 29, 2007. Prosecutors also accuse Woods of being intoxicated at the time of that crash.

I think I'll send this to my mom.

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Hyundai Heavy Industries, the world's largest shipbuilder, is set to buy a controlling stake in Hyundai Corp for 201.5 billion won. Hyundai Corp is also a former part of the Hyundai Group, a trading arm currently owned by creditors.

Korea Exchange Bank, Hyundai Corp's leading creditor, says the acquisition "will help Hyundai Corp boost its trading business and invest in overseas resources development for its long-term growth."

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Unleash the power of Juche, sea of fire, yadda yadda yadda.

But they say they will respond to dialogue with dialogue of their own. Sounds like my French class back in 9th grade. Sphere: Related Content

1. Should Mt. St. Helens (shown above during March 2005 eruption) become a national park?
2. Should Tejon Ranch (near Los Angeles) become a state or national park?
3. Should Maine Woods become a national park?
4. Should Southern California's chaparral get national park protection?
5. Proposals for new national parks (in case you haven't detected a theme by now)
6. BBC pictures of life in North Korea (including a scene from a church!)
7. Nintendo drops prices on Wii
8. Common-sense ideas for how to look seven years younger
   
9. WaPo op-ed on why health care reform needs to go all-out if you really want to make it work
   
10. Notorious English teacher-hating law-talking guy warns foreign buyers of Korean property about an innocuous document that foreign nationals must submit when they get a new home (English-language version of law relating to this)
11. The Seoul Podcast podcast that links to one of my posts but doesn't appear to talk about that post or any of the other related posts (an interesting podcast nonetheless, with Chris in South Korea as a guest)
    

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1. Despite objection from opposition parties, National Assembly approves Chung Unchan as Prime Minister (Korea Times)
2. North Korea's conciliatory gestures to top agenda at October 10 summit of Japan, South Korea, and China (MSNBC)
3. Chinese premier Wen Jiabao to visit North Korean from October 4 to 6 (Bloomberg)
4. Proposed national budget for 2010 includes 2.5 percent increase to bolster economic growth and provide stability for "ordinary people" (Yonhap)
5. Foreign students in South Korea top 50,000, accounting for 1.41 percent of total (Korea Times)
6. EU automakers seek to scuttle EU Commissioner plans for trade deal with South Korea by next month (Wall Street Journal)
7. SK Telecom sells China Unicom stake for US$1.28 billion (Wall Street Journal)
8. Sharp drop in imports leading to record high trade surplus this year (Korea Herald)
9. North Korea removes "communism" from national constitution, adds "cuckoo for Coco Puffs" (Yonhap)

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The Boston Globe has an interesting story on how assessing the number of deaths from H1N1 or any other type of flu is a very tricky process, and this may be leading us to be underestimating how lethal so-called "swine flu" actually is. It also discusses some quirks with reporting and how the official death toll of 593 as of the end of August jumped to just under 1600:

Marc Lipsitch, a Harvard School of Public Health epidemiologist, speculated that the official count of swine flu deaths - it stands below 1,600, as of the middle of last week - “is certainly an underestimate of the number of deaths. It may be a bad underestimate or it may be a modest underestimate, but it is certainly an underestimate.’’

For example, research from New York City, particularly hard hit by the virus in the spring, showed that almost 20 percent of the people killed by swine flu hadn’t been hospitalized, Lipsitch said, making it less likely such deaths would be linked to the disease. Multiplied across the country, that phenomenon could contribute to making the flu strain appear less lethal than it is.

Assessing swine flu’s impact was further muddied by a decision in the past month to change what counts as an H1N1 death.

Until the end of August, only cases confirmed by sophisticated labs were included in the national tally of deaths, which, by then, had climbed to 593. But state health departments, overwhelmed by the number of people infected, have mostly stopped doing the sophisticated and expensive tests to confirm swine flu.

So federal disease specialists expanded the definition to include deaths that doctors attribute to flu and pneumonia based on symptoms, and both the swine type and the seasonal strain count. Since that change was made, the count has grown by an additional 936.

Flu stands in stark contrast to other diseases that are far easier to monitor because they cause fewer cases with more distinctive symptoms. “With flu, we can have 60 million people potentially infected,’’ said Dr. Lyn Finelli, flu surveillance chief at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “We could never count all those cases, and we could never count all those deaths.’’

Note that some of this applies to "regular" flu as well. The article also suggests why H1N1 shouldn't be dismissed just because it hasn't yet killed as many as "regular" flu. In addition to the real possibility of the virus transforming into something much more (or less) pathogenic as it hops from infected person to infected person before we have a safe and widely available vaccine, there is also the fact that younger people (i.e., those born after a 1957 flu epidemic) may be more vulnerable to this new bug:

Flu viruses are capable of making subtle alterations in their genetic machinery that transform them into more - or less - fearsome pathogens. Timing is critical, too, and that’s especially true with swine flu: A vaccine isn’t expected to be widely available until mid-October, and the germ is already circulating among a population with little natural protection against it.

... A recent study found that people under 30 have little existing protection against the swine flu virus, while older adults harbor disease-fighting cells against the germ. It’s believed the older adults’ immune systems carry the memory of encounters with ancestors of the virus.

Kinda scary. Wash your hands. Stay home from work or school if you're sick with anything. Publicly chastise those who do otherwise. Sphere: Related Content

I've decided to launch a new feature where hopefully one of my readers (who, by all accounts, are highly intelligent and quite informed) will be able to answer something I don't know and can't seem to figure out. I have two such questions today: Sphere: Related Content

China has announced that it wants to build a manned space station with indigenous technology by the year 2020. Sphere: Related Content

Time Magazine has an interesting article on the association of spanking with lower IQ, including a discussion of whether there is a causative or correlative relationship:

So how might getting spanked on the butt actually affect the workings of the brain? Straus notes that being spanked or hit is associated with fright and stress; kids who experience that kind of trauma have a harder time focusing and learning. In another recent paper that he coauthored with Paschall, Straus writes that previous research has found that even after you control for parental education and occupation, children of parents who use corporal punishment are less likely than other kids to graduate from college.

Still, it's not clear if spanking causes lower cognitive ability or if lower cognitive ability might somehow lead to more spanking. It's quite possible that kids with poor reasoning skills misbehave more often and therefore elicit harsher punishment. "It could be that lower IQ causes parents to get exasperated and hit more," Straus says, although he notes that a recent Duke University study of low-income families found that toddlers' low mental ability did not predict an increase in spanking. (The study did find, however, that kids who were spanked at age 1 displayed more aggressive behavior by age 2, and scored lower on cognitive development tests by age 3.) "I believe the relationship [between corporal punishment and IQ] is probably bidirectional," says Straus. "There has to be something the kid is doing that's wrong that leads to corporal punishment. The problem is, when the parent does that, it seems to have counterproductive results to cognitive ability in the long term."

Everybody's case is different, I suppose, but my fear of getting punished for bad grades caused me to focus even more. The worst onslaught of physical and emotional punishment I ever received was the one time in my life I came home with a C, in seventh grade. So scarring was that incident that I never got anything lower than an A- (in the classes that counted) until college. Sphere: Related Content

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The Associated Press (via the Washington Post) is reporting that a light plane crashed at the site of the Global Fair & Festival 2009 in Inchon (Incheon), which was packed with tens of thousands of visitors. Sphere: Related Content

A nineteen-year old man from upscale Rancho Santa Margarita and three teenage minors (aged fifteen, sixteen, and seventeen) from nearby Mission Viejo were arrested for spray-painting hate speech-filled graffiti at an elementary school in Lake Forest, another community in tony south Orange County.

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The family reunions, now routinely held firmly on North Korean soil at Kŭmgangsan National Park at the Hyundai-built resort, is a font of "faces of the day." Above are South Korean Lee Jungho (이정호) and his older brother Lee Kwaesŏk (이괘석), who lives in North Korea. The AP story (via the Washington Post) from which this photo comes does not give any details of how they became separated, but their faces say it all. Sphere: Related Content

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This is not really a crime story as it is just a sad tragedy. One week ago, at around 6 a.m. on September 18, a woman was crossing Western Avenue in the western OC community of Buena Park when she was struck by a 1998 Ford sedan. She died five days later from head injuries she sustained in the crash.

The thing is that since the accident, no one has come forward claiming to know this person who was found without any ID. The Orange County coroner's office has issued a detailed description of her clothes and her person. She is being described as probably Korean, aged 45 to 60, with shoulder-length black hair with some gray.

They are saying she is likely Korean because of Korean-language tags found on her clothing. The tag below (신영모자) is a Seoul-based company. And as anyone who has lived in South Korea can attest, her belongings are typical ajumma attire, very typical of those women who grew up in the period immediately after the Korean War.

If I had to guess, I would say she is a South Korean immigrant in her fifties or sixties. The clothes were almost certainly purchased in South Korea or at a Korean-run shop in California. The likelihood of her being Korean is probably near 100%, and the likelihood of her being an immigrant pretty high as well.

Pictures of the items she was wearing or carrying can be found here. As almost anyone who has lived in South Korean can attest, that is the archetypal uniform of middle-aged South Korean women and older.

They're also saying she has "markings on her skin – three bluish or greenish dots, possibly tattoos, on the inside lower section of her left arm." I'm speculating, since no photos have been released, that they may be a series of small "Mongolian spots." Most Asians who have them lose them in childhood, but a small percentage still have them in adulthood. It is rare for women over forty-five in South Korea to have tattoos, except for those involved in organized crime, but such tattoos wouldn't be so ambiguous, so I'm guessing that it might be something else.

If her backpack appears dirty worn for a reason other than the crash itself, and especially if she had changes of clothing in it, she may have found herself recently without a place to live (fight with family, etc.). But I'm less certain of that. She could just as easily have been out for a morning walk, as a lot of older South Koreans tend to do.

It is sad that someone might be hospitalized and then die without any of their family knowing, or possibly not even caring. Jane 도씨, indeed.

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Jealous that Segway and Toyota were cornering the market on devices that would allow humans to move at the speed of walking but without all that pesky calorie loss, Honda yesterday unveiled a futuristic unicycle that allows users to move through the sidewalks while looking like someone is probing their ass.

The U3-X (the "3" stands for "three times the number of wheels this thing has) is the latest entry in compact self-balancing vehicles designed to deplete the wallets of people with more money than they would ever possibly need.

Unlike its two-wheeled rivals, this is the first entry with only one wheel. Reducing the number of wheels by half was a cost-cutting measure intended as a nod to the difficult times faced by even the filthy rich in the global recession.

The U3-X has a seat on the top and a tiny footrest on each side of the wheel. Riders steer by shifting their weight, while balance-control technology developed from research for the Asimo, Honda's bipedal humanoid robot, automatically keeps it upright.

In his spare time, Asimo is also working on other new robot technologies, and by 2013 is expected to have an army of 1.3 million minions, just under government estimates for the number required to overtake the Self-Defense Forces, if needed.

Honda warned that would-be riders above the upper weight limit of ninety kilograms will topple the device, Honda says, because even the most advanced technology is no match for the deadly combination of American obesity and Krispy Kreme.

With a handy-dandy handle, the device is easy to carry, weighing just 10 kilograms (160 donuts).

Honda officials said they think the electric unicycle will mostly be used indoors, mostly because of embarrassment.

So in conclusion, I would be remiss if I did not ask, when will Korea's Samsung, LG, Hyundai, Kia, or Lespo Bicycle Company get into the fray? Are we going to just lay back and let Japan win the race for the silliest looking transportation vehicle?

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The New York Times is reporting that South Korea topped the rest of the world's twenty largest economies in the percentage of economic stimulus money they spent on green projects.
China came in at #2, but with only half the amount of South Korea:

In order of the percentage of stimulus money committed to environmental projects, South Korea was first with 79 percent; China had 34 percent; Australia, 21 percent; France, 18 percent; Britain, 17 percent; Germany, 13 percent; the United States, 12 percent; South Africa, 11 percent; Mexico, 10 percent; Canada, 8 percent; Spain, 6 percent; Japan, 6 percent; and Italy, 1 percent.

It would be helpful to know what kinds of projects count as "green" projects. Does river beautification count?

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Well, if in the midst of a global recession, everyone was buying your products because they're seen as affordable but of good quality, of course you'd be confident.

Anyway, there's probably more to it than that:

Gross domestic product expanded 2.6 percent in the second quarter, the fastest pace since 2003. The government allocated extra funds and frontloaded the budget in response to the global recession. At the same time, the central bank trimmed the benchmark interest rate by 3.25 percentage points between October and February, the most aggressive easing in a decade.

The Kospi stock index has risen 51 percent this year as investors bet the economy is past its worst. An earlier government report showed sales at the nation’s major department stores, led by Lotte Shopping Co., increased for a sixth consecutive month while factory production climbed for a seventh month in July.

The Asian Development Bank, Citigroup Inc. and Barclays Capital Inc. this week raised their economic growth forecasts for South Korea.

Well, I'm feeling better. Sphere: Related Content

The Los Angeles Times has an article about the most recent edition of Rimjingang (림진강/臨津江), a magazine on North Korea published in Japan, which will feature inside stories — literally — from people actually inside North Korea:

The images will soon be featured in an issue of Rimjingang, a magazine published in Japan that offers a highly intimate look inside North Korea. What makes it all the more remarkable is that the quarterly publication consists of articles written not by outsiders, but by a few North Koreans, farmers and factory workers who risk their lives to provide poignant vignettes and hard-news accounts of life in their reclusive homeland.

The stakes are high. The reporters use pseudonyms because they know that if they are caught by North Korean authorities, they could be sent to prison or executed as spies.

Named by the magazine's reporters after a river that flows across the border from north to south, Rimjingang features everyday scenes of people's lives, from mammoth Pyongyang to the smallest villages. Since the magazine was launched in 2007, the tiny staff of reporters has delivered scoop after scoop.

Their cameras peek inside an illegal market where hungry children scavenge food from the ground. They offer images of a busy bus terminal patrolled by soldiers, a North Korean prison and a town where even children are put to work in a coal mine.

"I'm proud of these reporters," said Ishimaru, 37, editor of Rimjingang. "I'm committed to help them deliver a message to the world that they are risking their lives to report."

Amazing stuff, really. And makes the kind of thing that Laura Ling, Mitch Koss, and Euna Lee were supposedly doing pale in comparison. And speaking of the Tri-dumb-virate:

Not every reporter makes it. Some quit after experiencing the perils of reporting their stories and spiriting them out of the country.

Ishimaru travels to the border between China and North Korea to meet with staff members as they arrive to report their findings. He says the reporters' trips are always dangerous, but more so now since the two American journalists were taken into custody.

Nice. Oh, and DailyNK gets a mention:

Rimjingang has impressed Sohn Kwang-joo, chief editor of the Daily NK, a website reporting on North Korea from the outside.

"This is a magazine where North Koreans are the main characters," he said. "The regime does not want the world to hear their voices. But in Rimjingang, their lives and voices meld."

Go, Sohn. Great blog ("the hub of North Korean news"), by the way. Sphere: Related Content

UPDATE:
And I see it took only four days for this to reach The Hole. Had it been R. Elgin (the Marmot's Hole post author) who had written the comment below instead of The Marmot Himself, I'd have appreciated a hat tip. It is curious, Marmot, that you didn't do a post on this yourself, especially given your ties and insight to Tanzania and the rest of East Africa.

ORIGINAL POST:
This past spring, many pundits and bloggers alike were falling over themselves trying to be biggest critic of South Korea's grand bargain (before there was a Grand Bargain™) with Madagascar. The deal would have had a South Korean proxy controlling, through a 99-year lease, a chunk of that island nation equal to the size of Belgium (which, no coincidence, is the Korea or Europe™).

Like many geopolitical things involving Korea, it ignited into violence, turmoil, and civil war. The new guy who took over said he would cancel the deal, which was reported by the British press as the catalyst for the overthrow of the previous government. The British press also inveighed against the deal, led by Daewoo Logistics, calling it exploitative colonization of Africa.

And if there's one thing the British know, it's exploitative colonization of Africa.

Although Daewoo Logistics had promised the development of infrastructure — roads, hospitals, schools, farming equipment, etc. — the deal was tainted because it was seen as favoring the old president, and thus it was canceled.

Food security is a growing issue for many countries whose populations exceed the arable land on which they sit. South Korea, Taiwan, China, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and others have been quietly making deals to take over (or at least lease) large tracts of land to be used for farming.

Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing can depend a lot on what the the food-seeking countries can offer the people of the land-granting country. Here in Hawaii, I've met a number of international students from Africa, who have said not so pleasant things about what they refer to as exploitation by the Chinese.

By contrast, I have heard far more positive things about the South Koreans in their countries, but this may be an apples-and-oranges comparison: the Chinese are exploiting the land, while the South Koreans are largely NGO workers and missionaries setting up hospitals and other do-gooder services. Would South Korean companies operating under a major land-leasing deal be any different from the Chinese?

This is a pertinent question because, as I reported earlier, South Korea has penned a similar (but considerably less ambitious) deal in Tanzania. This would have the state-run Korea Rural Community Corporation (KRCC), a division of the Agriculture Ministry, developing a thousand square kilometers (a little under 400 square miles) of land. Half of it will be for local farmers, and the other half will be used to produce processed goods for Korea.

Korean officials say 1,000 sq km (386 sq miles) will be developed - half for local farmers, half to produce processed goods for South Korea. To put this in perspective, imagine a square-shaped area of land about 30 kilometers or 20 miles to a side, in a country 9.5 times larger than South Korea with slightly less than the same population. This planned arrangement is only 100,000 hectares, just 1/13 the size of the Madagascar deal. (Joongang Daily report on the deal found here, Reuters story here.)

Now just what does "develop" mean? From the BBC article:

[The KRCC] says it will produce processed foods like cooking oil, wine and starch on the land.

Lee Ki-Churl, a corporation official, said he expected Tanzanians to benefit from the deal.

"Some African countries export fruit and import fruit juice, or export olives and import olive oil, simply because their past colonialists did not teach them how to process food," he told the AFP news agency.

"We plan to set up an education centre for Tanzanian farmers in the food-processing zone in order to transfer agricultural know-how and irrigation expertise to them."

He said about 100bn won ($83m) would be spent to develop an initial 100 sq km of land over the next few years.

South Korea's Yonhap news agency reported that the corporation hoped to exploit deposits of iron ore, gold and copper in other parts of the Tanzania to help fund its project.

So the idea is to behave differently from "their past colonialists"? While their "present colonialists" be any different? The last paragraph there suggests a potential for gold fever to ruin things.

The KRCC themselves ought to face some scrutiny. Here's the kind of project they work on, according to their website:

The Large-scale Comprehensive Agricultural Development Project carries out general projects such as the development of water resources, the farmland consolidation, and the reclamation of tidelands for specific areas centered upon river basin to effectively develop the foundation for agricultural production and to promote the establishment of a welfare rural community through the improvement in the farming environment and in agricultural productivity.

That's right, these are the folks who, among other things, help dig up mudflats and wetlands to make farmland in South Korea, as in the project shown in the picture below.

From what I've heard of them before, they do a reasonable job of improving opportunity for the farmers in those areas, but at what environmental cost? A good question would be whether their expertise at building irrigation systems will be more suitable for bringing water to dry parts of Africa than it is for drying out wet parts of Korea to grow more rice. Maybe, then, this type of project is a good thing.

Operative word: Maybe. The KRCC should be watched like a hawk. Any Korean corporate group who works with them should be watched like a hawk. Moreover, if part of the aim is to truly improve the lives of the people who are doing the farming, have some legitimate Korean NGOs go in there and help the local Tanzanians with what they need (schools, hospitals, roads, etc.). There are already South Korean NGOs doing do-gooder stuff in the area, including a branch of the Saemaul Corporation which was largely responsible for improving the lives of rural South Koreans. Get them involved, particularly in a capacity that allows for checks-and-balances.

The goal should be twofold: Treat the Tanzanians as if they were South Koreans (well, better, I suppose) and be better than your competitors. In the 1960s and beyond, there were clear goals set for the improvement of the lives of the farmers in South Korea, and a similar standard should be set.

All South Koreans should understand that they and their country will be judged on the outcome of such deals. You have been warned.

I suppose I should translate this into Korean, eh?

[Side note: The same BBC article talks as if the Madagascar cancellation may not be written in stone. Specifically, it says the deal "has been thrown into uncertainty." In my book, that doesn't mean an end-all, beat-all cancellation. Is something going on behind the scenes we don't know about? Is Daewoo trying to renegotiate their original deal on terms more favorable to the new government? An interesting prospect.]

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Spotted at the Safeway yesterday: 특급현비

While the t'ŭkkŭp part makes sense (특급, special grade), I'm wondering what happened with hyŏnmi (현비, brown rice, unpolished rice).

Were they trying for a combination of 현미 and 변비 (constipation), since, um, brown rice sorta helps out with that?

Really, you'd think that with the million or so ethnic Koreans in the United States, how hard could it to run this by a proofreader? I mean, even if you don't have a lot of money to pay a proofreader (or just don't want to), there are like a quarter million Korean illegals running around the US. Just grab one!

Epic fail. Sphere: Related Content

It's not often I can combine my passion for public health issues and my love of boobies, so I relish it whenever I can (HT to LOTD).



Some people, apparently, have expressed offense or dismay at this, though I think they're missing the point. Without being any worse than a typical beer commercial (and thus not upping the ante in terms of pornification), it raises awareness about an issue that kills millions and about which many people prefer not to think. Sphere: Related Content

1. In echoes of Daewoo's failed Madagascar deal, South Korea pens agreement to develop 1000 square kilometers of farmland in Tanzania (BBC)
2. Sixty-one-year-old man with diabetes and heart condition is eleventh H1N1 flu fatality (Korea Times)
3. Pyonchang submits bid for 2018 Winter Olympiad, still spells it "Pyeongchang" (Korea Times)
4. Lee and Hatoyama reaffirm commitment to work together to end North Korean nuclear threat (Korea Times)
5. Microsoft to invest $19 million in South Korea's online gaming industry, to be divided among twenty-five local developers (BBC)
6. Constitutional Court says ban on nighttime rallies violates spirit of basic law (Korea Times)
7. Nine North Koreans enter Danish embassy in Hanoi, Vietnam, seeking asylum (BBC)
8. CDC to start daring new HPV vaccination campaign: "Your 12-year-old May Be a Slut!"
   

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In a recent post about whether it's appropriate or not for groups of North American spectators to strip off their shirts and spell out words with the letters painted on their bodies, commenter "1994" wonders how Americans would react, say, if Koreans started acting obnoxious at American Major League Baseball games:

Let's look at it this way, what would happen if a whole section of Dodger Stadium had Koreans and Thundersticks? How would that go over? What about Koreans at a ballgame in the US chanting and singing throughout the game? How would that go over? Both practices are completely fine in Korea, but would go over poorly back home.

Well, I thought, instead of a bunch of Koreans with Thundersticks at a Dodger game, how about a bunch of Americans with Thundersticks at an Angel game? 1994's comment reminded me of a connection between my home team back in Orange County and the cacophonous polyethylene sticks: The Thundersticks have their origin in Korea and they were popularized during the run-up to the Angels' first ever World Series victory in 2002. From the New York Times:

Called ThunderStix and CheerStix, they have been playing their clattering concertos at sports events since the late 1990's. (They also made an appearance at the 2000 Republican National Convention.) But ThunderStix appear to have exploded into the American consciousness (and eardrums) during the Anaheim Angels' playoff games at Edison Field.

Armed with their red, nonelastic polyethylene noisemakers (all freebies), Angels fans created a resonant din that was noticeably louder than the noise fashioned at the Metrodome by Minnesota Twins fans waving their Homer Hankies (cost: $1) during the American League Championship Series.

''I've never heard anything this noisy,'' said Kevin Uhlich, the Angels' senior vice president of operations, sales and marketing. ''I've seen things with great visuals. We did an umbrella giveaway where everybody spun them around. But with this, we get the visuals and noise in one.''

Okay, but what's the Korea connection? It turns out that the Thundersticks in use in South Korea since the early 1990s were noticed by Americans who then turned around and, ahem, reverse engineered the idea:

The history of the noisy sticks can be traced to Korean baseball games in the early 1990's, according to Lundberg and Les Laskey, the vice president of sales for Vonco, which makes ThunderStix. Lundberg worked for the Korean company that made them, then started his own company to sell his version.

''Then we broke open the U.S. market on Sept. 7, 1997, a United States men's national team soccer game in Portland, Ore., against Costa Rica,'' Lundberg said, recalling the event as if it were the day he discovered electricity. ''There were 30,000 CheerStix and the atmosphere was phenomenal. People said it was the greatest crowd ever.''

Laskey said that Vonco's entry into the market began with its noticing the noisemakers' popularity in Korea, and the company used its expertise in the manufacturing of plastic packaging and inflatable novelties in Lake Villa, Ill.

But to answer 1994's question, there are actually a lot of people who don't care for stands full of noisemakers, feeling it's a distraction for both players and spectators, but they associate it with Americans, not Koreans. If anything is associated with Korean fans, , and possibly picking up litter when the game is over. Sphere: Related Content